A small moan came from the bathroom. For a moment he dismissed it as someone—Norma or Ruby—having trouble doing her business and felt a flicker of embarrassment. But the moan came again and this time he recognized it as his mother—and the fear in it, the pain, was more than just the sound of someone trying to pass something that wouldn't move.

"Ma? You okay in there?"

A swish of darkness interrupted the light under the closed door. Then the sound of fingernails, lightly scratching. A weak thud.

"Mmmuh," she said weakly. "Mmmuh."

Trying to call out his name? Was she having a stroke?

"Ma, I'm coming in."

He jiggled the handle. Locked.

Fortunately, the door opened outward. He wouldn't have to worry about hitting her if she was in the way when he tore the thing open.

"Something wrong?"

Sheila stood at the foot of the stairs.

"I think she's having a stroke or something."

Sheila dashed up the stairs. He yanked on the door handle. She pulled with him. The door wouldn't budge.

Norma's bedroom door opened and she leaned into the dim hallway. "What's the hubbub?"

"Ruby fell. The bathroom door's locked."

Norma hurried into the hall in her bunny slippers. She reached into the breast of her nightgown and out came the skeleton key on a string. "Move it or lose it."

They stepped back as she reached the door, twisted her key in the lock and drew the door open quickly.

Ruby lay sprawled on the cold tile floor. Her nightgown was hitched up around her hips and one of her slippers had fallen off and lay beneath the toilet. The lid was up. She must have been trying to use the toilet and fell. Her eyes were closed. Yellow light from above made her eye sockets look skeletal.

"Ma!" He knelt down before her. Plucked up her wrist with its long pale scar and felt for a pulse.

For a moment he felt nothing and glanced up fearfully at the others, who waited for word.

Then he felt it. A soft, almost dry movement like a hard-shelled bug skittering under her paper-thin flesh.

"She's alive," he said.

Norma let out a relieved sigh. "I'll get a damp cloth." She turned on the faucet in the bath, grabbed a cloth from the lip of the tub and ran it under the cold stream.

"Ma, can you hear me?"

Ruby moaned softly. Her eyelids fluttered.

"Are you hurt? Is anything broken?"

An almost imperceptible shake of her head.

"I think we should get her into bed."

He looked up at Sheila, the only one of them with practical medical experience.

She nodded. "If nothing's broken, we should be fine."

The two of them lifted her gently to her feet. When they got her back to bed, Martin saw her walker was collapsed at the door.

"Ma, why didn't you have your walker?"

The old woman stared blankly at him. It reminding him of how she'd looked in the White Place, and a cold shudder passed through him. He remembered once thinking she'd never leave there. That she would live the rest of her life wasting away in that awful, dead-end place. Now he worried she'd have to go back.